Is Time Machine a viable Mac backup system? Yes, for remote usersIs Time Machine a viable Mac backup system? Yes, for remote users

Time Machine is a feature of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and its a great backup system for consumers and home workers. For businesses, however, it has limitations.Time Machine is amazingly clever. You connect a very large external hard drive to your Mac, and tell Leopard to use it for Time Machine. After Mac OS X copies the entire internal hard drive to the Time Machine volume, it then automatically copies every file that changes  automatically. In fact, it maintains old copies of files, not just the most recent.

Time Machine, therefore, give Mac users three benefits:

 If your hard drive dies, you have all of your data right there on the Time Machine volume.  If you delete or lose a file, Time Machine can help you recover just that file.  If you need to go back to an early version of a file, Time Machine can do that too.

This is great because for the most part, consumers and telecommuters dont back up their data  and if they do, backups arent not very frequent. Consider the cost of lost data within a business (high), and the price of external hard drives (low). I can heartily encourage you to purchase large external hard drive for every Mac user you have who isnt connected to an enterprise backup system. That could be office workers, too, if you dont have a centralized backup system.

However, wonderful as it is, Time Machine does not  can not  replace a true enterprise backup system. Thats because Time Machine backs up desktops to large external hard drive that are connected to the Mac. This lets you down if:

 Your building burns down, and the Mac and the external hard drive are lost.  Someone knocks over a desk, and both the Mac and external hard drive break.  Someone steals the Mac and external hard drive.  Someone decides to wipe both his/her Mac and Time Machine drives.

For that, you need a true disaster-recovery backup system, especially for your employees who are connected to a LAN. The backup system must copy data to a file server across the network  not to a locally connected external hard drive. That file server itself must be backed up regularly  and have those backups stored offsite. Further, access to the file servers backups must be rigidly controlled, with users able to read, but not erase, their backups.

Then, and only then, will your office Mac users be covered. The situation for remote or telecommuting employees is harder, particularly for a small business. If your main concern is data loss, Time Machine has you covered. For disaster recovery, it gets more complicated  and thats a topic for another day.